I help maintain a large site with thousands of pdfs. In the past few months, we have only been posting ADA compliant PDFs. Since we don't create the majority of these (most are created by third party designers using In-Design), we rely on software (CommonLook) to remediate these documents. This process is really complicated and time-consuming. Lately our vendors have been providing us with compiant pdfs but we are still required to vet each document page-by-page.We are required to have a Commonlook generated MHT file for each pdf that shows the document has been run through Commonlook and meets all checkpoints.

My coworker and I were wondering if it would be less work-intensive (and more screen-reader friendly) to create ADA compliant HTML from these PDFs somehow. I have looked at some tools that convert PDFs to HTML and so far none are very helpful. It would be ideal to find a product (or features of Acrobat X) that converts these publications into ADA compliant html pages.

Is this a viable strategy? Are there better ways to approach this problem? Anyone have suggestions?

In Indesign, reorder ALL the objects on page using send to back, starting with the last object on page you wish read, continuing until the object you want read first in acrobat is sent to the back last in InDesign. The result is that the Reading order is correct in Acrobat. Obviously, any object additions to a page means re-ordering the whole page. Changing copy doesn't affect this. Also, the order of objects on a page has no relationship to the page structure. It appears that the object reading order is as objects are added to page. Ist added (and furthest back), 1st read, last added (nearest front), last read. Shuffling the objects in the Document Structure pane has no effect on this order (and vice-versa).